A Paradoxical Argument for War

[Opening digression on the etymology and cultural connotations of the word "war" and how its meaning has evolved over centuries, complete with footnotes on sources like the Oxford English Dictionary and Commentary on the Influence of Ancient Languages on Modern Lexicons by Hilda Guzzler. This will go on for around 3 pages.]

...and so it becomes apparent that the term "war," despite its violent denotation, actually has a much more nuanced and multi-layered connotative field than we ordinarily assume. Which is to say that the concept of "war" is richer and more complex than we presuppose, and that this complexity must be acknowledged and probed before we can really start to unpack the question of whether war can, in certain contexts and circumstances, be regarded as a "good" thing. (Here I must digress briefly to note that the scare-quotes around "good" are employed not merely as a trite post-modern device to ironize and distance myself from the term, but because "good" is itself a problematic qualifier whose definition and ethical/moral boundaries are deeply unstable and context-dependent, a point to which I'll return in just a moment after this quick aside on the history of the just-war theory and its influence on early modern political philosophy from the 17th century onward...)

[A new 2-page digression on just-war theory and its philosophical implications, complete with close readings of excerpts from Kant, Grotius, Pufendorf, and the inevitable footnoted reference to Kierkegaard's treatise on the paradox of the ethical vs. the ethical-religious.]

...and so while the just-war doctrine has been employed historically to impose certain constraints on what could be considered moral and ethical forms of warfare, it still doesn't provide a satisfying framework for evaluating whether war can truly be considered "good" in any kind of universal or totalizing sense. For that, we would need to adopt a much more pragmatic and particularizing approach, one that recognizes that the "goodness" or value of any war lies not in some abstract ethical principle, but in the tangible, empirically-quantifiable outcomes and consequences of that war.

[A new 4-page section analyzing statistics and data on the economic, technological, social, and political impacts of various historical wars, complete with charts, graphs, and copious citations of academic sources, policy papers, and historical texts. This eventually culminates in the assertion that certain wars, despite their tragic human tolls, have had undeniably positive transformative effects that fundamentally altered the course of human civilization for the better.]

In this light, we can see how the conventional wisdom that "war is an unalloyed bad" is a simplistic fallacy that fails to account for the nuances of actual historical experience. War's horrific costs in human lives and suffering are undeniable. But to claim that no war has had any positive or "good" consequences is to be willfully blind to facts and realities that, while certainly complex and often paradoxical, are in many cases plain as day if one is willing to descend from the rarefied air of apriori philosophical reasoning and examine the concrete data.

[A new digression on the limits of pure reason and the problems of rationalist philosophy, with references to Hume, Wittgenstein, Quine, and even a brief literary analysis of the role of paradox and empirical realism in Catch-22.]

Not that I'm arguing for some kind of simplistic, jingoistic embrace of war as an inherent good. To do so would be not just unethical but also a-rational - a failure of logic based on a petitio principii of circular question-begging that simply assumes its own conclusion without substantiating it. That's not my point at all. Rather, I'm merely suggesting that we resist the easy categorization of all war as "bad" and retain an epistemological humility about the complex and often paradoxical relationship between the scourge of war and the progress of human civilization. For while war's costs are catastrophic, it is at times an unavoidable catalyst for technological, social, and political advancement in a world of scarce resources and clashing value systems. To deny this, however discomfiting, is to be ideologically bound by a philosophical dogmatism that is ultimately unfrue to reality.

[A final digression that both summarizes the overall argument and then proceeds to systematically dismantle and undermine it through relentless questioning and raising of new counterpoints, ending on an ambiguous, open-ended note that refuses to take a definitive stance on the original thesis.]